A Passion for Mastery

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

“Commit yourself to lifelong learning. The most valuable asset you’ll ever have is your mind and what you put into it.” – Brian Tracy

Dear Friends!

What a week it has been! After our summer stint in the Balkans, we took our special brand of NLP to Stockholm :-)! And we did a workshop on Emotional Address at the NLP association in Sweden. What fun it was! We are still reeling from it! While delivering a workshop, one thing happened that caught our attention…

At the workshop, among other people, was the grand master of mental training in Sweden! We were, as you can imagine very honoured to have him as one of the participants!

What totally impressed us was the fact that he was taking notes! This always impresses us, as we too never leave home without a pen and paper, and are great believers that we are all students and we are all teachers, and that we learn all the time…

To us this exemplifies clearly the principle that the road to mastery is a road of constant learning. The master does not stop learning once he has become a master.

This clarifies what is required in order to become a master at anything: A passion for the path leading to mastery.

Because this is what it is. A path. And a long one at that.

Practice makes mastery

Perhaps you have come across the 10 000 hour rule. Coined by K. Anders Ericsson, probably the world’s leading expert on expertise! The rule states that it takes 10 000 hours of deliberate practice to become a truly skilled expert. Not 10 000 hours of just doing an activity, mind you – if that were the case the world would be filled with experts – but 10 000 hours of mindful deliberate practice.

– The kind of practice that actually improves your performance, because you are paying attention to the feedback you get. And the kind of practice that actually improves your performance, because that is what it is designed to do. This is not much about the “talent” you have, it is about the fact that you are willing to spend the 10 000 hours improving your skills.

Talent is most often just the starting point. And those who are talented do not necessarily advance faster than those who are not.

Other cultures have recognized this long ago. Once a young American who wanted to become a painter asked his Chinese teacher if he was talented enough. And the Chinese teacher answered that he didn’t really care about talent, but did the student think he was ready to spend his whole life painting.

Enjoyment of improvement

This of course points us towards one of the central secrets of mastery. If you are going to spend a lifetime in constant improvement, you’d better choose a field where you enjoy what you are doing while you are improving. You have to have passion. It is a bit like falling in love.

Now you may wonder how this goes together with NLP and other tools for accelerated learning. The answer is simple.

NLP will help you practice more efficiently and learn faster. Experts who use NLP simply advance further during the years than those who don’t. And there is another bonus here: you can use NLP to increase your enjoyment of the process.

Achieving mastery is a bit like climbing a mountain. And the thing with climbing a mountain is of course that there isn’t really anything at the top. Well, actually there is: a great view :-)! It’s less crowded, the air is cleaner :-)! But unless you enjoy the climb and the descent, it would only be a lot of hard work for a few moments of enjoyment. If on the other hand you are capable of enjoying the climb, then it starts to become a pleasure to climb a mountain.

The real difference is, of course, that when you are aiming for mastery, you don’t stop when you reach the top – you keep climbing :-)!

With this in mind, may we invite you to take some time and consider a thing or two that you may have on your “to do” list, that is waiting to be mastered…Write down what you are willing to do in order to master it…Are there any steps you need to take…Let us know, we’d like to hear how you are getting on!